My Nerdy Friend

What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim, Jane Christmas

I thought I was going to dislike this book simply because the author, Jane, visits a psychic before embarking on a pilgrimage across the Camino do Santiago de Compostela in order to be foretold of things that might befall her on her journey. Good god. A psychic? I thought the book title was symbolic but apparently it was literal. Sheesh.

But it turns out my dislike goes much deeper than that.

I borrowed the book from my very good friend CP and was invited to make comments in the margins, as she had already done. CP is one of the funniest people I know, particularly in written form, so discovering she had annotated the book was a dream!

By page 5, I already knew Jane Christmas was going to bug the crap out of me (I texted as much to CP). By page 64, I knew I was right. But as is the case with any hiking book I read, I was also captivated by the idea of hiking this path with none other than CP, who had already written on page 5 that she was “never doing this ever”. This is the thing about me and hiking books. I love them for the hiking parts no matter how good/bad they are, and seem to just mentally skip the other parts. Not this one though. Jane the Pilgrim was bugging me just a bit too much and was also neglecting to report enough on the hike itself to win me over to her narrative.

Page 74: She is bemoaning her aloneness, after just having bad-mouthed almost every single person in her 15-woman group, and is relishing the companionship of her only friend, her walking stick. She is complaining about all the mud, having to use her sleeve to wipe her nose, the cold and feeling homesick. The hike is hard, and it wears people down. I get that. Except it’s DAY TWO. She has TWENTY EIGHT more days to go!

Page 76: She complains for several paragraphs about what she has to endure, when facing constant low-grade persecution as a Christian. Lord have mercy. I invite Jane the Pilgrim to enjoy life as an outed atheist for a couple of days. Or maybe don a hajib and waltz around Quebec or France for a few days. Or be a muslim and try to cross the border into the US.

Page 117: Jane believes that “what scares women the most is the thought of being shunned.” I would actually hazard a guess that what scares women the most is the thought of being raped or murdered, but what do I know.

Page 129: After organizing 15 women to come together on a trip to hike the Camino, Jane can’t figure out why they are looking to her to lead them and are then disappointed when she fails to rise to the occasion. In what may be the peak of her self-delusion, Jane can’t understand why she has trouble bonding with women. Perhaps now that she’s done writing this book she’ll take a moment to read it…

Page 163: Jane the Pilgrim waxes on about her refusal to buy/wear a rain poncho because it is orange and lacks style. I think I’ve hit on one of the reasons why the other women in her group don’t like her very much. Her vanity is almost too much to tolerate.

By the end of the book, Jane manages to make a couple of female friends and even acquires a damaged boyfriend who lasts beyond the end of the book. So maybe she did manage to mellow a little during her pilgrimage and, with luck, she found something of what she was looking for. But there was nothing really in this book to offer other than her own un-self-aware journey of failing to meet people, over-generalizing about women, and forgetting to talk about the spiritual nature of the hike itself.

Rating: skip it.

The Likeness, Tana French

Tana French writes with such intensity, this is one of those rare books that is hard for me to separate from. Her characters are so present in their world, and with each other, that inanimate things feel alive to them, as though they are absorbing energy from the characters themselves. As the main character, detective Cassie Maddox, infiltrates a circle of friends (although “friends” doesn’t seem like a strong enough word to describe their relationship), going undercover as one of their own in order to solve a murder, she too finds herself drawn into their power and intimacy.

This book is not for the faint of heart. It’s very long, although google tells me it’s only 466 pages and should take about 6-7 hours to read, so maybe it just feels very long. But not long in a bad way.  The writing is vividly metaphorical that reading it takes more effort than just your typical weekend escape novel.

It’s interesting to see the level of intimacy that the 4 (or 5, depending on how you are counting) characters in the book have with one another. They comfortably share clothes and space and help themselves to each others’ food, drinks or cigarettes.  Thinking that this was a bit unusual, I started thinking about the intimacy level of various relationships that I see in my life and it was surprising.  My nieces are very comfortable with physical as well as emotional closeness, using each other, resting their legs or heads in each others’ laps and so on. Most of my close relationships do not extend to casual physical contact beyond hugging, however I do have a close group at work and we are extremely comfortable with physical contact, sharing food or drinking each other’s drinks. It just makes me wonder how this type of relationship evolves in some cases but not in others. If nothing else, I suspect this book will give you something to think about too.

Rating: borrow it. This probably won’t be a re-read for me.

Passion on the Vine, by Sergio Esposito

This is a book about wine and food. And then some. And then some more.

There can be little doubt that Esposito is a very good writer. He also loves wine and food – Italian wine and Italian food, to be precise. He wants to bring Italian wine to the world stage, and he wants to introduce the world to the Italian way of life, and I think he does a fine job of both.

If this book were set in Spain, I would immediately buy 10 copies for my friend CP, so that as she wore them out one by one, there would be replacements. As it is, I’ll buy her 1 copy and she will LOVE it. I liked it, but I didn’t really love it.

Confession #1: I’m not a “foodie”. I don’t like to cook, I don’t like to grocery shop, and I rarely know or care what kind of cheese I’m eating. when I read a medieval book like Game of Thrones, where the authors love to include entire paragraphs listing out the food dishes that are being served at big events, I literally skip right over to the next paragraph because I find long, description paragraphs about food tedious and kind of boring (Sorry GoT food fans!). By the 3rd or 4th chapter of Passion, I felt a bit the same way. I’ll wait a moment for the food lovers to pick themselves up off the floor …… By the end, every chapter seemed like just another repeat of the last chapter(s) and I had lost interest in the (beautifully written) descriptions of what they ate and how they cooked it.

Confession #2: I like to drink wine, I like the taste of wine, I like big earthy reds and crisp flavourful whites. But I am a very poor taster of wine, if I am judging myself by modern-day standards. I can never taste what other people taste (until someone says “there’s a note of black cherry” at which point I realize “yes, yes there IS a note of black cherry!). So a book that covers the assorted tasting notes of a couple dozen Italian wines is not the best fit for me. That said, I do have to give Esposito some credit for bringing wine tasting back to what we would call First Principles in math, which is to say experiencing the wine, savouring its complexity and connection to the land rather than reducing the wine to its individual flavours and aromas.

Rating: For foodies and wine connoisseurs, this is definitely a book for you! For everyone else, let’s order some pizza and open a nice bottle of Chianti.

Uglies is the first book of a trilogy (later expanded to 4 books) that takes place in a dystopian (yay!) world where teenagers grow up in Ugly-town until they are 16, at which time they are moved across the river to Pretty-town where they undergo extensive plastic surgery to make them pretty. In this case, being “pretty” means looking pretty much like everyone else on the planet and becoming an empty-headed socialite in the process. One rebel group of citizens decides being pretty isn’t their life-goal and go into hiding, setting up an ugly-camp where people appreciate their differences rather than longing for sameness. Everything seems pretty peaceful, with everyone getting pretty much what they want, until the powers in pretty-town figure out where the uglies are hiding their camp and attack them. It turns out not every is happy with the idea of “live and let live” and there are obviously some darker forces at work here. The book ends more or less mid-battle with a very blatant segue into book two, “Pretties”.

The book is an enjoyable, teenage dystopian novel similar in vein to The Hunger Games and Divergent. I haven’t read Pretties yet, but only because other reading obligations have gotten in the way – I fully intend to read the entire 4-part trilogy, probably during a vacation. Certainly the idea of people being beautiful in their own skin is something that more teenagers, especially girls, need to hear more of. I applaud the author for undertaking this theme.

Rating: Borrow it, or buy it and then give it to a teenager you know.

aka Reliving my favourite Daily Show moments

There is no real reason to buy this book unless you LOVED watching Jon Stewart host The Daily Show (I did). It is a chronological collection of anecdotes in the form of short quotes and stories from former correspondents, writer and executives of the show sharing insights into key moments during Jon’s 18 year run.  The real insight came from understanding how Jon Stewart navigated the show from a fluff comedy bit to satire on the serious news issues of the day, forcing politicians and journalists to be accountable to their own nonsense. Lead by his brilliance and vision, other comedy shows followed suit and The Daily Show became the inspiration for Seth Myers’ “A Close Look” as well as changes to the tone of SNL’s “Weekend Update”, in addition to inspiring many brilliantly satirical late-night shows such as “Last Week Tonight”, “Full Frontal”, and “The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore”.

So yeah, if you loved the show, buy the book, because you’ll enjoy it too. If not, skip it.

The Murder Wall

A challenging book to read, it is not well written and abrupt transitions in the narrative give it a choppy feel that is difficult to get into to. The author uses several awkward techniques in her writing style, my least favourite being the use of ellipses to leave sentences and chapters unfinished. I understand the use of ellipses to evoke a feeling of suspense or intrigue in short communications such as email or text, although I would argue that careful use of language can achieve this without the use of obvious punctuation. But Hannah’s over-use of ellipses is highly distracting. She also has a habit of trying to evoke a sense of mystery by purposely withholding information in sentences or paragraphs and immediately following this up by a “reveal”. This is another unnecessary and distracting habit of her writing style that actually lessens the intrigue rather than adding to it. On top of it all, I never really connected with any of the characters in the book and therefore wasn’t invested in the outcome of the story. I think the author had all the elements of a potentially great story, but poor writing and choppy narrative took away from that.

Rating: Skip it.

Station Eleven

After reading this book last year and loving it, I picked it for my BBCE book club selection. I decided to reread it, partly because I loved it so much and partly because I wanted it to be fresh for the book club meeting. My original review is here.

As it happens, I found the book just as good the second time and feel like I picked up on a few things that I missed the first time, because I knew the story and wasn’t distracted by the suspense of not knowing what was coming. I also think I have some clarity about the ending, with respect to the Jeevan character, that I didn’t put together on my first read.

I’m going to leave it at that, because if you haven’t read it, I absolutely don’t want to spoil it!

Rating: Buy it. I’ve read it twice inside of just a few months and am glad that I did.

I Let You Go, by Clare Mackintosh

I have been procrastinating on this post for 2 full months. I really enjoyed this book, and have lots to say on it, however there is literally no way  I can think of to say it that isn’t in some way a spoiler. In fact, even saying that is enough to tell you that the book is spoil-able, which in itself is a bit of a spoiler…

I can say that it takes place in Wales. That’s nice. If I were to go to Wales this summer, I would actually seek out the story locations from the book, because the author does such a good job of making the locations very visual.

When I went to Ireland in 1994 with my girlfriend MCM we bicycled around the north coast. Once of the most wonderful and unexpected joys of cycling in Ireland is how immersed you can get in the sounds and smells and the feel of the country that you just can’t get from being in a car. You can hear the wind blowing across the fields and the sound of the mists hitting your rain jacket as you bike down a hill. You can feel the peace and quiet. You can smell the farms and the grass. Ireland is breathtakingly beautiful and the north coast has a ruggedness that you don’t expect from the Emerald Island (a deserved nickname if ever there was one). Clare’s description of the west coast of Wales kind of felt like this to me – like you could immerse yourself in her descriptions of the cliffs, the beach, the foreboding ocean.

Rating: Borrow it, read it and then let me know you’re done so we can talk about it. Don’t be put off by the back cover description, it’s not what you might think.

Foreigner

Book Three of the Quintaglio Ascension

My least favourite of the trilogy, Foreigner takes on more than it can chew (no pun intended). After introducing us to the Quintaglio society through the adventures of Asfan, the Galileo of their world, we move to book two where we meet Asfan’s son Toroca, the Darwin. In book three, we encounter Mokleb, the Freud. But in addition to the Freud story line, the Quintaglios discover a previously unknown set of islands where they find a race of “Others”. Unfortunately the Others invoke an extreme territorial instinct in the Quintaglios causing them to attack and kill any Others that try to interact with them. This eventually leads to the somewhat weak suggestion that the territorial instinct is just a psychosis (a weak way to further explain the Freud element) that was instilled in them at an early age by a religious culling of creche-mates instituted in order to control population. Meanwhile, another group of Quintaglios excavates a crashed spaceship, releasing a swarm of nanobots that use rock and dirt to build a set of space elevators and a new spaceship, which the Quintaglios need to escape their doomed homeland.

All in all, it’s just too much. The Freud story line felt forced to me, and distracted from the important mission which was to find a way to travel into space in search of a new home before their planet/moon is torn apart by extreme tidal forces in a few short generations.

Rating: Borrow the trilogy, but temper your expectations.